Hi, I'm Robert.
I built Customer Finder. Here's the story behind it, and the other things I've shipped.
Why I built Customer Finder
Before I wrote any code, I spent five years at Oxford Plastics selling plastic and composite products to the UK construction industry. I started as a development engineer and ended up as the Business Development Manager who built a sales channel from zero to £2m per year in three years.
One of the tactics I kept coming back to was LinkedIn keyword search. I'd open LinkedIn, type the keywords that my competitor's product tended to come up under, and message the people commenting on those threads. They weren't cold leads; they'd already publicly said they were thinking about the kind of thing I sold.
In 2024 I did a Data Science & AI bootcamp at Le Wagon and started shipping my own products. First DotFit, then Sashy.ai, then Footprint on the App Store. For every launch I went back to the same trick. The medium changed (now it was the online communities where my customers hung out, like Reddit, Hacker News and Indie Hackers), but the pattern carried straight over from B2B construction sales to indie-hacker SaaS, and it still worked.
Customer Finder is that workflow, automated. Paste a URL or describe your product, an LLM picks the right 5-9 communities and the right keywords from a 35-site catalog, and it surfaces the conversations you can join, ranked by how well they match. I use it for every new product I launch.
What I've shipped
- Footprint
iOS app to track and reduce your everyday carbon footprint. Live on the App Store.
- Animalis Game
iOS game. Live on the App Store.
- Robert's Waitlists
A no-code waitlist builder.
Background
- MEng Mechanical Engineering, The University of Sheffield (2009–2014).
- Postgraduate Certificate in Leading Business, University of Gloucestershire (2019–2021), Distinction.
- Five years at Oxford Plastics Ltd as Development Engineer and then Business Development Manager (2018–2023).
- Data Science & AI intensive at Le Wagon (Jan–Mar 2024). Python, SQL, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, GCP.
- Continuing education at the University of Oxford in C++ (2020) and Python Programming for Data Science (2023).
- Published in IOP's Biofabrication (2016) on inkjet-printed Schwann cells.
Get in touch
Email me at robert.whiteley@sashy.ai, or find me on X, LinkedIn, or GitHub. If you've used Customer Finder and have feedback (good or bad), I'd genuinely like to hear it.